‘Music lights up the same areas of the brain that respond to other things that excite us and make us happy.’Source:Supplied

SOME drugs go in and out of style while others seem to always be in demand.

What I was surprised to find out, when doing research for a book recently, is that one of the most powerful drugs around can be found right under our noses.

Actually, make that inside our ears.

Yes, I am talking about music. Whether it’s rock, pop, rap, metal, classical, folk, country — or any other style you can think of — the music you love gets inside your head to such an extent that it acts like a drug. And, like with other addictive substances or experiences, it can mean that we’ll spend a whole lot of money to get more of it.

I didn’t get into drugs as a teenager, but I was utterly obsessed with the 1980s boy band New Kids on the Block (who favoured a clean-cut if uncool “Don’t Do Drugs” mantra.)

When they reunited in 2008 and went back on the road, fellow fans and I joked about needing “another hit” of them. Seeing New Kids in concert just once wasn’t enough and it started to feel like we were always trying to capture the feeling of the best time — the first time we had seen them live.

That’s me, and the New Kids addiction is pretty obvious. Picture: Rebecca WallworkSource:Supplied

Of course, this all felt like a cute way of describing a habit that, like the old T-shirts and cassette tapes stashed at the back of the closet, we probably should have outgrown. It wasn’t until I began to analyse the success of the New Kids album Hangin’ Tough for my book of the same name that I began to see just how similar this fixation on New Kids was to other addictions.

Songs such as You Got It (The Right Stuff), I’ll Be Loving You (Forever) and Hangin’ Tough still make my skin prickle if I unexpectedly hear them come on the radio.

It’s like they run through my veins and are a part of me, like those songs are mine. What I didn’t understand was how and why they had this effect on me. Surely it had to be more than just the fact that I thought New Kids were the cutest guys ever when I first laid eyes on them on Video Hits?

So, in addition to interviewing a bunch of people from the 1980s music scene, I looked closely at the science of music to find out if there was a nerdy explanation for my obsession. My first clue was a New York Times article by two scientists, Robert J. Zatorre and Valorie N. Salimpoor, who described their research on music and emotions and compared a person’s favourite music to a chosen drug.

I tracked down a music cognition expert (someone who studies the psychology of music and how our brains process it) from Berklee College of Music, Susan Rogers, who confirmed what I had read: “Music, as a reward, lights up the same areas of the brain that respond to other things that excite us and make us happy — sometimes food or sex,” she said. “Music is a lot like food in that we can have a craving for it and we want that same taste — to know exactly what we are going to get.” When we have our expectations met, it’s very satisfying.

Music is something that can stay with us for years. Picture: INFphoto.comSource:INF

The key ingredient for our brains is dopamine, a neurotransmitter released when we hear music we love but also by natural mood-lifters like food and sex. Dopamine release is also part of our body’s response to drugs like cocaine and amphetamines.

When I tracked down Valorie Salimpoor, one of the scientists whose work appeared in the New York Times, she explained that there’s another source of that happy-making dopamine — anticipation.

“Dopamine is usually increased when you know something that you like is coming up,” she said. “You’re very excited about it and you’re anticipating it. That anticipation releases the dopamine.”

If you think about human evolution, the production of dopamine makes sense because it reinforces things we need to survive — we need to eat and procreate. But scientists still don’t quite understand why music can trigger such a similar response.

“Music is not even tangible,” said Salimpoor. “It’s fleeting — it’s not something you can hold onto.”

It is, however, something that can stay with us for years. Salimpoor and her fellow music cognition experts have found that the music most of us return to again and again is the music we loved as teenagers. It’s a crucial age because we’re super sensitive and our hormones are raging.

Which is why dopamine released by the brain at that time makes a bigger impression on us. Learning this made me think again about the way I was trying to recapture that rush of seeing the New Kids live for the first time all over again.

I wondered if this was similar to what drug addicts experience — always trying to relive that first time their drug of choice gave them a high.

“When people do cocaine for the first time, it’s very powerful and very exciting,” Salimpoor told me. “The second and the third and fourth time they do it, it’s never really as good. Every time, they’re trying to get those feelings back again.”

This feeling is what leads to the questionable choices addicts can make about how much of a drug to take and how much to spend on it.

The internal rationalisation for spending money on something we really want is itself a field of study Salimpoor specialises in. It’s called neuroeconomics, and can apply to things like shopping as well as our consumption of music.

Don’t start deleting all those addictive MP3 files off your kids’ iPod or laptop just yet, though. There is, it turns out, a difference between the way our brains process the feel-good dopamine released by illegal drugs and the kind produced more naturally by our favourite music.

“Cocaine is not produced in your body, it’s coming from outside,” Salimpoor explained. “The more people do it, the more they get desensitised.”

But the kind of dopamine our body creates itself is not bad for you; it’s not going to give you withdrawal symptoms.

“That’s the cool thing about how music can release dopamine,” said Salimpoor. “It’s natural. It’s not necessarily a bad addiction that’s going to destroy your life.”